Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb [Paperback]

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofThe Making of the Atomic Bomb,is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.

Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would dominate world politics for more than forty years.Chapter 1

'A Smell of Nuclear Powder'

Early in January 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, a letter from Paris alerted physicists in the Soviet Union to the startling news that German radiochemists had discovered a fundamental new nuclear reaction. Bombarding uranium with neutrons, French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie wrote his Leningrad colleague Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, caused that heaviest of natural elements to disintegrate into two or more fragments that repelled each other with prodigious energy. It was fitting that the first report of a discovery that would challenge the dominant political system of the world should reach the Soviet Union from France, a nation to which Czarist Russia had looked for culture and technology. Joliot-Curie's letter to the grand old man of Russian physics got a frenzied going-over in a seminar at Ioffe's institute in Leningrad, a protégé of one of the participants reports. The first communications about the discovery of fission...astounded us, Soviet physicist Georgi Flerov remembered in old age. ...There was a smell of nuclear powder in the air.

Reports in the British scientific journalNaturesoon confirmed the German discovery and research on nuclear fission started up everywhere. The news fell on fertile ground in the Soviet Union. Russian interest in radioactivity extended back to the time of its discovery at the turn of lC$